I was taken aback. I hadn’t seen or expected this in my brother at all. But obviously it was better this way. The paintings would have been dull if they had been merely an extension of that part of him that was important to me when we were both trying to free ourselves from a suffocatingly religious family. Years later, after I’d gotten used to his being a professional painter and having shows at Allan Stone’s gallery in New York, the old disrespect and provocation did surface in his work, but in a way I could never have imagined. He called these his “havoc paintings.” Perhaps impatient that not everybody had appreciated the quiet irony of all his townscapes and gardens, he now broke up those tranquil settings in grotesque earthquakes of upheaval. They weren’t quite the same settings; it was still London, but rather than the humbly inhabited suburbs, the focus was now on the preposterous monuments of the Victorian era. It was as though everything that expressed British pride, presumption, and pomposity had fallen victim to some painterly poltergeist.

The discontent lies in Mo Yan’s language. Open any page, and one is treated to a jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd socialist rhetoric, and literary affectation. It is broken, profane, appalling, and artificial; it is shockingly banal. The language of Mo Yan is repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value. The English translations of Mo Yan’s novels, especially by the excellent Howard Goldblatt, are in fact superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness. The blurb for The Republic of Wine from Washington Post says: “Goldblatt’s translation renders Mo Yan’s shimmering poetry and brutal realism as work akin to that of Gorky and Solzhenitsyn.” But in fact, only the “brutal realism” is Mo Yan’s; the “shimmering poetry” comes from a brilliant translator’s work.

November, almost December, and it is time for those gift guides and best-of lists again. I’ll avoid posting too many of these but here’s the Guardian’s books of the year list, featuring the likes of John Banville, Geoff Dyer, and Mary Beard. Have a gander: [via the Guardian]